Charles Hoskinson, one of the founders of Ethereum [ETH] and now one of the figureheads of the Cardano [ADA] cryptocurrency, recently appeared on an interview to speak about his motivation for creating the cryptocurrencies he did. Moreover, he also picked out his options for the best smart contract platform in the market currently.

Hoskinson revealed his reasons for creating Ethereum and Cardano, stating that he had disagreements as to the level of functionality that should be included in the base layer of a network. This is so that a financial system that can be created that is actually worth anything.

He also spoke about the implementation of sidechains on the Cardano network, stating:

“We have much better properties with the way we are approaching sidechains including new cryptographic primitives. The chains are firewalled from each other so you don’t need a federation to peg. And we’ve put our money where our mouth is, we’re implementing it. We’ve built them for both PoW and PoS currencies.”

On the subject of developing scalability solutions for the Bitcoin [BTC] network, he stated that it was an “extremely frustrating”. On the work that Blockstream carries out, Hoskinson stated:

“Blockstream does good work, [Rusty] Russell wrote Simplicity which is a great programming language and could be a good replacement for Bitcoin’s Script. I think their whole vision with Lightning is a good one. I wish the Bitcoin community was a bit more eager to innovate cause if they don’t they’re eventually going to lose their throne and it’s going to be extremely hard for them to get it back if they do.”

When asked about his picks for the best smart contract platform, Hoskinson’s first response was Ethereum. He also spoke about Vitalik Buterin, one of the most influential individuals regarding Ethereum. He stated:

“I’d say what Vitalik is doing with Ethereum is a perfectly legitimate approach. if you look at his philosophy with Casper and Plasma and moving from EVM to Web Assembly, its logically consistent and a reasonable collection of ideas and i think within a reasonable time, 2-4 years they probably can realize that vision. If they are successful, they’d be a great platform to deploy smart contracts on.”

His reason for branching off from Ethereum and starting Cardano was because of disagreements about economic and governance issues, and on the rolling out of new features. He stated:

“We [Cardano] tend to be more peer-reviewed academic based where they tend to be a more open-source hacker approach. Ethereum is one of the the strongest smart contract offerings.”